


Tell me now, how should I feel?

by PerpetuaLilium



Category: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Genre: 1980s, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon, The Problem of Susan, World Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-08
Updated: 2019-03-16
Packaged: 2019-11-13 17:31:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18035798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerpetuaLilium/pseuds/PerpetuaLilium
Summary: Susan Pevensie is almost sixty years old, and she is looking back just as often as she's looking forward.Canon-compliant Susanfic featuring emotional ambivalence, business, and travel.





	1. The Home Counties

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic in this fandom; I recently reread the books for the first time since childhood. I tried to hew close to Lewis's own writing style as a challenge to myself.

Long ago in the days of Mrs. Thatcher and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, when your parents might have been children or young men and women, when women wore their hair in overdone bouffants and the music on the radio was sharp and overenthused, a woman named Susan Pevensie worked as a marketing manager in a large company in the Home Counties.

Susan was almost sixty years old but wore her dark grey hair in a younger woman’s style. I hope it won’t remind you too much of your least favourite adults if I tell you that she casually disliked children and even in the days of her brief long-ago marriage had never really thought of having any of her own. Even so, she was polite, gentle, and welcoming to almost everybody who came into her life, whatever age or sort or condition they were. She was still tall, still good-looking, and a little vain, but nobody held her vanity against her really.

If you’ve read a series of books called _The Chronicles of Narnia_ you may know that Susan had once travelled twice with her older brother, younger brother, and younger sister to a land called Narnia, which was not in our world and could only be reached by Magic. In particular if you’ve read a book called _The Last Battle_ you will remember that the world of Narnia was ended and Susan, unlike her siblings, was not able to go to the new, Real Narnia that was created then, because she had not been in the railway accident that had killed her brothers, sister, parents, and four family friends. You may think it morbid to pity somebody her not having been killed in a railway accident, but for the first several months after the accident Susan was very disconsolate about this indeed. She wished that she could be with her family, wherever they were, and for a good while she felt guilty for not having gone along with them in trying and getting back to Narnia. It had taken her a good six or seven months to decide that she wanted to live after all and that Narnia was neither here nor there in the life that she had to live out the rest of; however, you will be pleased to hear that she never insisted as strongly as she once had that Narnia had been some sort of dream or game.

Her brothers Peter and Edmund had had with them when they died a strongbox that contained several Rings of what looked like green and yellow glass. The strongbox had come into Susan’s possession and she had pried it open but had had a strong, queer feeling that she ought not to touch the Rings, which she had dumped into a large manila envelope that she kept in a drawer of the desk that she used when she worked from home. The man to whom Susan had briefly been married had thought that this was uncommonly silly of her, and they had often fought over it; it was only now that they were older and still lived in the same town but had not been married for many years that they could each understand what the other had been getting at in their long-ago fights over it.

Susan had done several years’ duty as a secretary for the company that she worked for before a thing called second-wave feminism had happened (ask your mother or grandmother) and all at once she had started being promoted when she had not before been promoted in almost twenty years of work. She found that she was good at helping to manage her company’s marketing and procurement practices; she was also one of those lucky people who has enough of a moral backbone to want her bosses to behave better to their workers and to the public, but enough of a kind face to get away with asking them to. The employees she supervised liked her, and the men who supervised her liked her as well, not least because, having also inherited quite a bit of money when her family had been killed, she rarely asked for a raise.

Unfortunately, and as Susan was all too aware, no matter what she might do the milk of human kindness flowed sluggishly in English corporate offices in the days of Mrs. Thatcher. There were several in her office, including several of the copy-writer, mailing-list-custodian, and chartered-accountant sorts of people who worked along with her or under her, who liked her but did not respect her. They found, she heard them saying at their tea breaks or in the men’s lavatory that she passed on her way to the photocopier, that she acted too young and not matronly in the sort of way that one might expect of a woman of her age. I am sure you have met many fifty-nine-year-old women in your life, and I am sure only some, if any, of them have been exactly matronly; nevertheless this was what was expected of Susan, and after a certain point in her career people started saying that she was “not aging gracefully” and thus that it would be embarrassing to promote her any further.

“Pevensie,” a man who was twenty years her junior and two organizational-chart ranks her inferior said to her over tea one day, “you’ll have to do something about your hair before the boss sends you to the meeting in Milton Keynes. The way you have it up makes it look like you just got back from a Jazzercise class.”

Susan who _did_ in fact go to Jazzercise classes twice weekly, on Thursday evenings and Sundays during the day, looked up at this man, whose name was Willcox, with a look in her eyes that she hoped came across as something close to withering. Regrettably, Susan had one of those faces that had once looked quite stern when she needed it to but had long since become far too used to the purpose of placating clients and supervisors to be of much use for anything too far different from that. Willcox believed that she was trying to apologize to him.

“You might want to cut the whole pompadour off, or at least back,” Willcox said.

At this moment two quite remarkable things happened to Susan, neither of which anybody else would have been able to notice even had they been pointed out. The first was that she realized all in a flash that even if she were offered a promotion and a raise she would not, at this point in her life, take it, nor indeed did she wish to while away the last six years till retirement even in her current position. The second was that it fully came to her that she had been a queen once, with courtiers and a crown and a throne and the most gorgeous clothing anybody might have wished for, and that she was not altogether sure that she was a queen no longer.

“Willcox,” Susan said as gently as she could bear to, “you aren’t being constructive.”

“I’m sorry,” said Willcox, in the insinuating way that a particular kind of grown-up man sometimes does (I’m sure you have heard it, even if you did not recognize it), “if you don’t need or want this advice.”

“What I need and want,” said Susan, “is a holiday.”

~*~

This was an offhanded comment but, as such comments sometimes do, it worked its way into Susan’s mind till it was fixed there quite firmly, and a few days later she spent an evening at the bookshop looking through guide-books about most of the Western European countries and a few in the Middle East as well. Eventually she decided that the country that she would be the most interested in visiting was Italy. Susan had been to America once as a teenager, after her trips to Narnia but before her bonds with her siblings had begun to go sour, and had visited several of the English-speaking countries as part of her job over the past ten or twelve years, but she had not been to the Continent before. She decided to take a week or ten days of her paid holiday time and use some of the money that she had inherited to pay her way for flights into and out of Rome and lodging and meals while she was in Italy.

Susan had her secretary, whose name was Miss McNabb, arrange a schedule for her next month that would leave some time free, then bought some plane tickets, and off she went. “While you’re at it,” she had said to McNabb while they were talking about her schedule, “please do me a favour and see what renting a car in Italy is like. You know how I feel about rail travel.”

“Very well, Ms. Pevensie,” said Miss McNabb. “I’m happy to research it _off the job;_ your holiday’s not really the company’s business.”

“If you’d be so kind,” said Susan. “You’re a good friend.”


	2. The Eternal City

It turned out that on the Continent they drove on the right-hand side of the road and Susan had to go through a process to get an international driver’s permit before she could hope to rent a car in Italy. The process was not difficult for Susan since she had had an immaculate driving record since a fender-bender in 1974. Your parents will probably know the kind of fender-bender I mean: it had not been at speed, and had indeed happened while Susan was trying to manoeuvre into a parking space that the other driver had just left. She had, I’m afraid, used strong language with the other driver, as he had with her, but all had come right by the end of the argument.

The plane ride was cramped and uncomfortable; they use smaller and less comfortable planes for flights within the same continent. Susan spent it sipping from cups of soda water and looking out the window at sights that she had long wanted to see but had not expected to see for the first time from the air: the French countryside, the Alps, Lake Geneva, the Riviera. When the plane descended into Rome her ears hurt very badly, and the pain did not quite subside almost till she was out of the airport.

She took a taxi into Rome, not thinking too carefully or paying too much attention to the countryside and the suburbs that the car was passing through. She sat back in the taxi with something called a Walkman, which played music from something called a cassette tape that you do not usually see anymore but often did see in 1987. Susan enjoyed listening to more recent music; it kept her young, she felt, which she liked even though her employers did not.

 _Those who came before me_  
Lived through their vocations  
From the past until completion  
They’ll turn away no more  
And I still find it so hard  
To say what I need to say  
But I’m quite sure that you’ll tell me  
Just how I should feel today

She listened to quite a lot of songs from this band, which was called New Order and played the sort of sharp and overenthused music that I mentioned at the beginning of this story, all the way up until the taxi came to the room in which she would be living for the next five days, in a series of flats high above a street called the Via del Corso. From the front door of this building Susan could look up and down the streets to see throngs of fashionable young people, trendy shops, and a few churches associated with Roman Catholic cardinals whom she had never heard of. She hauled her luggage up to her room, then took the elevator, an old and creaky thing with grates and ornamentation such as you might have seen in very old movies, down to the street to have a walk around.

Over the next two days Susan spent most of her time exploring the Via del Corso and neighbouring parts of the city, doing some shopping and in general getting acclimatised to a foreign clime. These were the first streets that she had walked in which there was little or no English being spoken; Susan had a little bit of French, but she found that it wasn’t helping her much. She had with her an Italian phrasebook that she had got at the bookshop, and that helped a little. If you have ever been to a foreign country yourself where a language that you do not speak is being spoken, you might understand.

On her third full day in Rome Susan decided to take a visit to the Vatican and see St. Peter’s Basilica, which you probably know is the largest and most important church of the Roman Catholic religion. Susan was normally not very interested in things religious or things Catholic but she had heard many stories over the years of what an artistic masterwork the Basilica was and she wanted to see it for herself. She walked across the city in her only pair of trainers, over the Tiber River that is the colour of cloudy jade at midday, to the wide boulevard leading up to the Vatican, which is called the Via della Conciliazione and was laid out by the dictator who led Italy during the Second World War. She did not consider this promising, but then, there was quite a lot these days that she did not consider promising.

Susan took some time to be awed by the great Square that is before the Basilica, an enormous stone oval flanked by gargantuan colonnades, with an obelisk in its centre. In this Square the Pope had been shot some years ago, but there were still far less guards about than Susan would have expected. There were only some of the Pope’s own guard who wear queer blue and yellow uniforms with helmets like the ones you see on Knights in storybooks. There were metal detectors to get into the Basilica, but Susan got through without much trouble, although it did take up some time.

Susan got into the Basilica and her eyes did not know what to focus upon first. Every direction you looked there was a spectacular piece of art, including on the ceiling and the floor. Straight ahead there was a long aisle, which was not the central aisle of the nave, leading up to a side-altar many hundreds of feet away. She looked to the left across the central aisle; she looked to the right into the alcove and then she saw the statue by Michelangelo called Pietà, and after a few baffled, awed seconds, her blood froze in her veins.

The statue was of Mary the Mother of Christ holding her Son in her arms after He was taken down from the Cross. The proportions of the two figures were somewhat strange—Mary looked larger than she should compared to Jesus, Jesus a little smaller than He should compared to Mary—but she remembered that she had read once that this was for reasons of Symbolism. The looks on the figures’ faces were such as would break anybody’s heart.

The way Susan felt now was very much as one might feel upon waking from what one thinks is a dream, then, walking through one’s house and going about one’s morning, seeing something from the dream staring one straight in the face, but not immediately recognising it. She thought back to Lucy, her sister now dead for thirty-eight years, who had insisted so strongly that it had been a real other world that they had been to in their early days, and that on the Stone Table the Great Lion really had been killed and risen from the dead again for their brother Edmund. Lucy in the last two or three years of her life had made a strong connexion between what they had been through, or thought they had been through, in Narnia and what the priest or vicar said in the Church about Jesus Christ. On one Good Friday in particular she had been to a service on which she said it “fell into place” in her mind. Susan had found this unusually placid and complacent of Lucy and had made sure that she knew it. Of course less than two years after this had happened Lucy had had a church funeral that Susan even in her morbidity had recognized was genuinely beautiful.

Susan felt now as if she were looking back to that argument on that Good Friday, and indeed as if she were looking back to the Stone Table again, as you might look through a pair of coin-operated binoculars at the top of a skyscraper or a mountain. It was distant and difficult to understand to be quite real, but she did not feel, looking back to it, as she might feel looking back to a dream or a vision. It felt sure and solid, only just a bit out of her reach. It felt as she imagined she might have felt after her holiday ended, the way that things feel and places feel that are certainly difficult but by no means impossible to get back to.

In a word, she began to feel that perhaps Lucy had been right. This was something that she had let herself feel for a little while at the funeral and immediately after, but it had seemed, ever since, like something that she had felt in extremities of grief that she no longer wanted to allow herself. She had felt for a long time as if she had grieved enough and could stand to be done grieving. There was so much left of her life and so much that she wanted to do in it—and she had been happy for much of it, even though she was beginning to be bored and dissatisfied now. She had never thought it would be necessary to open up the treasure-box of that grief again. I don’t expect this will be too clear to you; it’s something that grown-ups often feel but that children should never have to.

For much of the rest of her time in Rome, Susan went round to various churches. She never felt quite as she had in St. Peter’s looking up at that statue. She was glad that she did not have to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Susan's exploration of Rome bears some similarity to my own when I visited the city.
> 
> The song that Susan is listening to is "Blue Monday" by New Order. The title of this fic is also a line from "Blue Monday".


	3. The City of Peace

On her drive to Assisi, Susan noticed two things. The first was that once she got out of the immediate suburbs of Rome the drive was through beautiful, hilly countryside such as had not existed in her part of England, excepting maybe the Green Belt that goes all round London, for some years. What struck her most about the countryside was the _smell._ If you have ever been on a car ride through the countryside in harvest-season, on a still-warm day with enough of a breeze to blow the scents to you through the open car windows, you will know what I mean. Susan took in deep great draughts of it and felt more grateful than she had in a very long time.

The second thing she noticed was that she at one point passed a little town called Narni. It was not terribly much to look at, she thought; it was just an old town clustered on a hilltop with some newer housing-developments interspersed among flat fields, most of them fallow, in the valley below. Even so, the name still struck her. She was surprised by how strongly it struck her, but it was striking in a way that did not rouse her to action; if anything, what it did was to make her notice the smell even more.

By the by she arrived in Assisi. It was early afternoon and the day had gone from bright to unseasonable. It was still warm, but thick-looking grey clouds were forming overhead and a silvery mist had settled around the town. She left her car in a car park at the bottom of the hill on which the old town of Assisi is built and climbed up through the sloping streets to her hotel. It was in a building that looked maybe six or seven hundred years old—perhaps even older; perhaps even it had been here in St. Francis’s time—but its lifespan as a hotel was still quite young. Susan did not know what it had been before it was a hotel.

Susan checked into the hotel and then walked through the streets to the great Basilica of St. Francis, which is in fact two churches built one on top of the other. The one below is in an older style, at the time that the church was built in the thirteenth century; the one above is in the newer Gothic style, the style of Lincoln Cathedral and several other of our great cathedrals in England, but which was never quite as popular in Mediterranean lands. If ever you find yourself in the hills of central Italy, I recommend very much that you go to Assisi and see the basilica.

Looking down from the piazza in front of the basilica, the valley was wreathed in the mist that billowed around the hill. Looking up and over her shoulder, she could see the mist thickening round the flanks of the mountain that rises behind Assisi.

She walked through the streets thinking about shopping. The town was busy and there were street hawkers here and there, selling art or jewellery or roasted chestnuts. She bought a cheap necklace, cheaper than she usually went for, and a paper cone filled with chestnuts, which she found that she liked and which reminded her of Something.

After about twenty minutes she came across a shop that was selling clay tiles illustrating scenes from the life of St. Francis. The tiles were quite ordinary and done up in a style of art that Susan disliked, but one of them in particular caught her eye nevertheless. It showed St. Francis reaching down to stroke the head of a Wolf that was putting one of its forepaws up the way a Dog might. The Saint was saying something to the Wolf in Italian and raising his hand to bless it; the way he was raising his hand looked a great deal like the way it was raising its paw.

Like a flash something that Susan had heard thirdhand long ago, in another life and world, came back into her head. _“It is the country of Aslan, the country of the Waking Trees and Visible Naiads, of Fauns and Satyrs, of Dwarfs and Giants, of the gods and the Centaurs, of Talking Beasts.”_

The chief thing that Susan wanted to do at this point was to take the tile and throw it to the cobbled ground and stomp on it till she reduced it to powder. She ended up buying it instead. She brought it back to her hotel, then waited till it was time for supper and went out to a restaurant where she had a plate of pasta with wild boar-meat in it and, I’m afraid, drank altogether too much very strong red wine.

~*~ 

Clara McNabb was just getting ready to go to bed at her flat in a certain suburban town in Berkshire when she got a telephone call. She answered it and heard heavy breathing.

“Hello? This is Clara McNabb.”

“Miss McNabb, hello,” came a slightly slurred but on the whole shockingly cogent and put-together voice. “It’s Su Pevensie.”

“…Ms. Pevensie? Are you all right? I thought you were on holiday in Italy.”

“I am on holiday in Italy. I’m calling you from a hotel phone in Assisi. I would like to tell you how it’s been so far.”

“Well, all right, but I don’t really understand why you’re calling _me_ about this.”

“Because I talked to you about this trip. Because I feel as if I can talk to you about a great many things.” Clara said once again that it was all right, and Ms. Pevensie continued. “The first thing I would like to tell you about Assisi, Clara,” she said, “is that it’s foggy here. Imagine that! You come to Italy and it’s just as foggy as it is in London or Canterbury or Oxford.

“Believe it or not I’m not complaining, though,” she went on before Clara could say anything. “It gives it character and atmosphere. I feel as if Assisi is the sort of place that would almost lose something if you saw it in typical sunny Italian weather.” (Later on Susan would tell Clara that she had no idea whether this was a conventional opinion to have about Assisi or not. She would also tell her that she thought it was important, in a way that beggared description, that she had not, to any degree, wondered to herself whether it was a conventional opinion or not before she had said it.)

“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” said Clara.

“I’m not sure if I’m enjoying myself or not, actually. This holiday is teaching me things about myself that I didn’t want to be taught. I’m beginning to feel about myself the way I used to feel about tiresome old Aunt Polly and that stuck-up—” and here she said a word that it’s not polite to use outside a kennel “—Jill Pole.”

“Were these among the friends you lost in the train accident?” asked Clara. They had never discussed the train accident right out, not in a decade of working together, not in a decade of Clara working in an office in which everybody knew.

“They were, yes,” said Susan. “A long time ago I realized that they had lived beautiful lives in their way, though not the kind of life I wanted for myself. What I’m wondering now is whether or not I’ve lived a beautiful life too.”

“I should say you have,” said Clara. “You’ve always been very kind to me. Working for you has actually been fun; I never thought I would say that about being a secretary. Perhaps it comes of having been a secretary yourself once.” (Clara was between thirty and thirty-five, and had not known what she had wanted to do before becoming Susan’s secretary.)

“I would guess that it does,” said Susan. Then she sighed and said “Oh, this wasn’t what I wanted to be doing my whole life, but it’s better than some ‘whole lives’ I could think of. You say when you’re young that you want forever with a man and you’re told you’re too young to want that; you say when you’re even younger that you want a different kind of forever—a religious forever or a spiritual forever, whatever you want to call it—and you’re told you’re too _old_ to want that.”

“Would you like to come to church with me this Christmas?” Clara said carefully after a long pause.

“Not in particular,” said Susan after another long pause, “but I do appreciate the offer much more than I might have, once.”

They said their goodbyes. Clara hung up first, and got into bed with her adventure novel to read till her eyes dropped closed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Susan's hot take on Assisi is pretty much my own from when I visited it. I don't particularly care whether it's a common opinion or not either.
> 
> Narni really is on the way from Rome to Assisi, almost exactly halfway. It was called Narnia in Antiquity; Lewis first found the word in an atlas of the Classical world. A famous (in some circles) Narni native is even named Blessed Lucy Brocadelli.


	4. The Wood between the Worlds

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who read through this story.

Susan did end up going to church on Christmas Eve with Clara that year after all, though she didn’t enjoy it exactly. Early in the next year she was told that her company was in negotiations to be bought by a Japanese consumer-goods conglomerate. She got the last promotion in her career after all (even Willcox, though surprised, was happy for her) as she was told to change her Italian phrasebook for a Japanese one and head over to Kyoto with two of her colleagues to be wined and dined by the would-be investors.

Clara, who was fond of books like one called _Neuromancer_ and films like one called _Blade Runner,_ had a picture of the Pacific Rim regions in her head that revolved around colossal skyscrapers and floodlit billboards. Susan did not find Kyoto to be like that exactly, although something about the core of the city did make it feel even denser than it actually was.

The time that she spent with the important people of the consumer-goods conglomerate was not particularly pleasant. She found that they thought poorly of women in a way just different enough to be jarring from the way her own employers thought poorly of women. She did enjoy eating with them at smoky, mysterious old restaurants (the way you might feel about any fancy restaurant, but a way Susan did not feel about fancy restaurants in England and a way the Japanese with whom she was eating did not feel about these restaurants) and sampling the queer noodle and fish dishes of a far-foreign clime.

There was one particular fish the name of which she did not remember in Japanese and never learned in English. It was light pink in colour, very delicate of flesh, and, marvel of marvels, _tasted almost exactly like pavender._

The day after Susan returned to England and finished sleeping off the strange sleep one gets on airplanes, she took the manila envelope out of her desk and dumped the Rings out on to a table. She was driven by a feeling that she could not name to take one of them up in her hands and put it on. It was yellow as lions’ fur. She slipped it on to her finger, and everything changed.

~*~ 

Susan found herself in a thick wood filled with pools of shallow water. For a few moments she barely remembered who she was or where she had come from; then, bit by bit, things fell back into place for her. It did not seem to be Spring, or Summer, or Fall; the leaves overhead were thick and green, so thick and green that she could not see the sky, but somehow you could tell from looking at them that they had been thick and green for endless years and would be thick and green for endless years more. There was a soft, springy turf underfoot, and a few tree-trunks away Susan saw a guinea-pig sniffing around in the grass with a yellow Ring like the one on her finger tied around its back with a piece of string. And it was at this point, as she looked from the guinea-pig back down to her own hand, that Susan remembered, and understood.

She looked up again, and there was Aslan, towering above her. Wave after wave of golden fur rippled in the soft greenish-gold light coming down through the endless leaves. He was enormous, far larger than any ordinary lion, and yet larger also than she could remember him being in her far-off childhood days. Not knowing what else she could do, Susan sank to her knees.

“Stand up, Susan of Narnia,” Aslan said, in that low rumble that was like and was unlike a purr and a roar. “We have come too far together to stand on formality any longer.”

Susan stood up. She felt dazed and as if she had been knocked over. Her head swam as she thought to herself that she could not imagine Aslan saying “Peter of Narnia” or “Edmund of Narnia” or even “Lucy of Narnia.” (I hope you will not think too poorly of Susan if I tell you that once or twice a very long time ago she had thought to herself things like “Of course Lu got to go back a third time. _She’s_ his _favourite.”_ ) “Why,” she asked, “do you call me Susan of Narnia, after all this time?”

“Because you loved Narnia. Because you were a Queen in Narnia. Because your heart broke when I told you that you could not come back; because you cried yourself to sleep many a night pleading with me; because after you were told that another girl—but I do not say her name; this is your own story that I am telling—had got here because she had called to me and I had called to her, you began to believe that you had done something wrong. Because Narnia is what you loved and what you no longer needed and what you believe me to have kept you from and what you might now love or need again, therefore I am calling you Susan of Narnia.”

“Did it hurt?” asked Susan in a thick, aggrieved, deliberately unkind tone of voice. “When you let me live, did it hurt you?”

“I notice, child, that you are not asking if it hurt me to let the others die.”

“I know you better than that at this point. I’m turning sixty years old next month, you know. Five years till retirement. The last time we saw each other it wasn’t even yet within five years of my wedding day.”

“Do not say: the last time we saw each other. _I_ have certainly seen you since then. I believe that you have seen me too, Susan, although you might not know it.”

Susan remembered an old limerick, or a pair of limericks, that she had read once in a book of poetry that she had inherited from Father (when he, of course, died in a train derailment). She thought she remembered that one of the limericks was by Monsignor Ronald Knox, but she could not remember which one.

 

_There once was a man who said: “God_

_Must think it exceedingly odd_

_If He finds that this tree_

_Continues to be_

_When there’s no one about in the Quad.”_

The second limerick went:

 

_Dear Sir,_

_Your astonishment’s odd:_

I _am always about in the Quad._

_And that’s why the tree_

_Will continue to be,_

_Since observed by_

_Yours faithfully,_

_God._

 

Susan would not bow or kneel to Aslan again and say “My Lord and my God!” or anything of the sort. That would have been how Lucy handled this conversation. (Indeed, it _was_ how Lucy had handled this conversation, scant moments after the end of the book called _The Last Battle_.) Instead, Susan stood up straighter and said “I think I know Who you are now. I think I always knew Who you really are.”

“You do not sound impressed, or reverent, or disappointed, or angry.”

“I’m interested in results, Sir,” said Susan.

“In outcomes, yes. That was always something I noticed about you.” He did not say whether He had liked or disliked it about her. Susan found herself, to her own shock, not caring which it was. She found herself wanting to please Him finally, but not feeling any shame in the event that she did not. It was rather like how you might feel about a teacher who is not your favourite but whom you do not dislike.

“Are you going to get into another pool?” asked Aslan finally. “The green Rings take you down into the pools.”

“I’m—afraid I didn’t bring a green Ring with me,” said Susan.

“Fortunate, then, that you met Me here. I will return you to your own room, in your own house, in England. I will ask you, then: would you like to take up the Rings again, and travel through the worlds that you see here?”

“I have responsibilities,” said Susan. “A career. A life in England. McNabb and Willcox—”

“You will come back the moment you left, as it was in the days of Narnia of old. Miss McNabb and Mr Willcox will never know that you were gone. I am offering this to you as a sign of glory, child, and a sign that I never stopped choosing you. Travelling, it would seem you found Me again; travelling more, you might get to know Me more. But I am giving you the choice—to not take this choice will not be to reject Me. You have served Me long and well in England, though you knew it not.”

“I’ll go back to my room, thank You,” said Susan, “and consider this.”

~*~

 

Susan put the Rings in the manila envelope again—brushing them into it with the edge of a book—but did not put the envelope back in the drawer of her desk. She left the envelope lying on top of her desk and went into the kitchen to start preparing dinner. Her lips formed a little prayer as she decided that she would sleep on Aslan’s offer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I imagine the fish that Susan has as sea bream or something similar to it. Her first impression of Kyoto is substantially my own, but I had more preexisting knowledge about Japan before going there than she does. Conversely, I have much less experience with business dealings or fancy restaurants.
> 
> Both limericks are by Knox.
> 
> I'm not crazy about the last few lines of the dialogue between Susan and Aslan but wasn't sure how to tighten them up.


End file.
